Relationship In Love

Swingin’s Sex? I Don’t Think So…
It all started the way it always does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackersand sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couples-only sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked—having sex—right in front of him. Unlike S&M clubs, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy’s firlfriend was kind of freaked out—aothough, when another naked woman brushed against her, she “sort of liked it.” According to him.
In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn’t want me to write aobut it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.
I started imaging all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples. Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grapeleaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress. We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened. The club’s answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.
“At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet,” said a voice of indeterminated gender, which added that there was “a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet”—things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, “Oriental Night” would be held on November 19. that sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant oriental food, not oriental people.
I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn’t have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book, Talk Dirty to Me, enthuses about public, group sex: “This is a taboo in the truest sense of the word…If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries… The center will not hold.” I should have asked myself, what’s fun about that?
But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my calendar listed two events: 6:00 P.M., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30 P.M., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.

Messy Women; Knee Socks
Everyone , it seems, likes to talk about sex, and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner, packed with glam-models and expenseaccounted fashion editors, was no exception. In fact, it got our end of the table worked up into a near frenzy. One stunning young woman, with dark curly hair and the sort of Seen-It-All attitude that only twenty year olds can pull off claimed she liked to spend her time going to topless bars, but only “seedy ones like Billy’s Topless” because the girls were “real.”
Then, everyone agreed that small breasts were better thatn fake breasts, and a survey was taken: Who, among the men at the table, had actually been with a woman who had silicone implants? While no one admitted it, one man , an artist in his mid-thirties, didn’t deny it strongly enough. “You’ve been there,” accused another man, a cherub-faced and very successful hotelier, “and the worst thing is …you …liked…it.”
“No, I didn’t,” the artist protested.”But I didn’t mind it.”
Luckily, the first course arrived, and everyone filled up their wineglasses.
Next round: Are messy women better in bed? The hotelier had a theory. “If you walk into a woman’s apartment and nothing’s out of place, you know she’s not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She’s going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this, because I’m literally the messiest person in the world. And I probably have some old containers of General Tso’s Special Chicken lying under my bed at this moment. Unfortunately, all of it was eaten alone. So much for that theory.
Steaks were served. “The thing that really drives me crazy,” said the artist, “is when I see a woman wearing one of those tartan skirts and high knee socks. I can’t work all day.”
“No,” countered the hotelier, “the worst thing is when you sort of follow a woman down the street and she turns around and she is as beautiful as you thought she was going to be. It represents everything you’ll never have in your life.”
The artist leaned forward. “I once stopped working for five years because of a woman,” he said.
Silence. No one could top that.
The chocolate mousse arrived, and so did my date for Le Trapeze. Since Le Trapeze admits couples only—meaning a man and a woman—I had to asked my most recent ex-date, Sam, an investment banker, to accompany me. Sam was a good choice because, number one, he was the only man I could get to go with me; number two, he’d already had experience with this kind of thing: A million years ago he had gone to Plato’s Retreat. A strange woman had come up to him and pulled out his unmentionable. His girlfriend, whose idea it had been to go there, ran screaming from the club.
The talk turned to the inevitable: What kind of people go to a sex club? Everyone at dinner firmly asserted that the clubgoers would generally be “losers from New Jersey.” Someone pointed out that going to a sex club is not the kind of things you can just do, without a pretty good excuse, e.g. it’s part of your job. This talk wasn’t making me feel any better. I asked the waiter to bring me a shot of tequila.
Sam and I stood up to go. A writer who covers popular culture gave us a last piece of advice. “It’s going to be pretty awful,” he warned, though he had never been to such a place himself. “Unless you take control. You’ve got to take control of the place. You’ve got to make it happen.”

Night of the Sex Zombies
Le Trapeze was located in a white stone building covered with graffiti. The entrance was discreet, with a rounded metal railing, a downmarket version of the entrance to the Royalton Hotel. A couple was coming out as we were going in, and when the woman saw us, she covered her face with the collar of her coat.
“Is it fun?” I asked.
She looked at me in horror and ran into a taxi.
Inside, a dark-haired young man, wearing a striped rugby shirt, was sitting in a small booth. He looked like he was about eighteen. He didn’t look up.
“Do we pay you?”
“It’s eight-five dollars a couple.”
“Do you take credit cards?”
“Cash only.”
“Can I have a receipt?”
“No.”
We had to sign cards saying that we’d abide by the rules of safe sex. We got temporary membership cards, whick reminded us that no prostitution, no cameras, and no recording devices were allowed inside.
While I was expecting steamy sex, the first thing we saw were steaming tables—i.e., the aforementioned hot and cold buffet. Nobody was eating, and there wsa a sign above the buffet table that said, You Must Have Your Lower Torso Covvered to Eat. Then we saw the manager, Bob, a burly, bearded man in a plaid shirt and jeans who looked like he should have been managing a Pets ‘R’ Us store in Vermont. Bob told us the club had survived for fifteen years, because of its “discretion.” “Also,” he said, “here, no means no.” he told us not to be worried aobut being voyeurs, that most people start off that way.
What did we see? Well, there was a big room with a huge air mattress, upon which a few blobby couples gamely went at it; there was a “sex chair” (unoccupied) that looked like a spider; there was a chubby woman in a robe, sitting next to a Jacuzzi, smoking: there were couples with glazed eyes (Night of the living Sex Zombies, I thought); and there were many men who appeared to be having trouble keeping up their end of the bargain. But mostly, there were those damn steaming buffet tables (containing what—nini-hot dogs?), and unfortunately, that’s pretty much all you need to know.
Le Trapeze was, as the French say, Le Rip-Off.
By one A.M., people were going home. A woman in a robe informed us she was from Nassau County and said we should come back Saturday night. “Saturday night,” the Woman said, “is a smorgasbord.” I didn’t ask if she was talking about the clientele—I was afraid she meant the buffet.

Talking Dirty at Mortimers
A couple of days later I was a a ladie’ lunch at Mortimers. Once again, the talk turned to sex and my experiences at the sex club.
“Didn’t you love it?” asked Charlotte, the English journalist. “I’d love to go to a place like that. Didn’t it turn you on, watching all those people having sex?”
“Nope,” I said, stuffing my mouth with a corn fritter topped with salmon eggs.
“Why not?”
“You couldn’t really see anything,” I explained.
“And the men?”
“That was the worst part,” I said. “half of them looked like shrinks. I’ll never be able to go to therapy again without imagining a bearded fat man lying naked and glassy-eyed on a man on the floor, getting an hour-long blow job. And still not being able to come.”
Yes, I told Charlotte, we did take our clothes off—but we wore towels. No, we didn’t have sex. No, I didn’t get turned on, even when a tall, attractive, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties entered the rumpus room and caused a stir. She exposed her bottom like a monkey, and within minutes, she was lost in a tangle of arms and legs. It should have been sexy, but all I could think about were those National Geographic nature films of mating baboons.
The truth is, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not mainstream events. And neither, for that matter, is S&M, despite what you may have recently read elsewhere. The problem, in the clubs, anyway, always comes down to the people. They are the actresses who can never find work; the failed opera singers, painters, and writer; the lower-management men who will never get to the middle. People who, should they corner you in a bar, will keep you hostage with tales of their ex-spouses and their digestive troubles. They’re the people who can’t negotiate the system. They’re on the fringes, sexually and in life. They’re not necessarily the people with whom you want to share your intimate fantasies.
Well, the people at Le Trapeze weren’t all pale, pudgy sex zombies: Before we left the club, Sam and I ran into the attention-grabbing tall woman and her date in the locker room. The man had a clean-cut, all-American face and was talkative: He was from Manhattan, he said, and had recently started his own business. He and the woman had been colleagues, he said. As the woman slipped into a yellow business suit, the man smiled and said, “She fulfilled her fantasy tonight.” The woman glared at him and stalked out of the locker room.
A few days later, Sam called and I screamed at him. Then he asked, hadn’t the whole thing been my idea?
And I said yes, I had. I told him I had learned that when it comes to sex, there is no place like home.
But then you knew that, didn’t you? Din’t you? Sam?